


Bridges

by cebw12



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Family, Hurt/Comfort, Love, Other, Relationship(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 21:54:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6825961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cebw12/pseuds/cebw12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An Orphan Black/Beloved crossover au.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bridges

That was the first time she thought that maybe, just maybe, she could have a future with them. With Cal, who had shown up on her doorstep and never left. With Kira, who she would do anything for, who she had given everything for. After DYAD, after Project Leda, she had never stopped running. She had built four walls around her and a fence to keep the ghosts inside. But now, watching Kira laugh, letting Cal buy her every stuffed animal at the carnival, watching him grab her hand when she ran for the carousel, she thought, just maybe.

It was hot, and there was laughing.

The wind blew her hair, and blew away a little of the soil. But it would take a lot more. It would take shovels.

Kira ran ahead on the road. Sarah wouldn't have let her go, except that she could see the house and the yard in the distance. Kira left a hole between them, but it wasn't a forest, it was a river. And you could build a bridge over a river. And if anyone could build a bridge strong enough to hold both their weight, it was Cal.

Kira's chest was fluttering, but she felt the air get heavier as she approached the house. She didn't mind. When she started to forget, the angry angel would knock over a mirror or make Sarah yell to remind her. She didn't mind. She was running, and letting that presence move through her lungs and fill her up. She stopped. There was someone sitting outside of the house, on the stump. The air caught in her throat. No one had ever been waiting for her at the house. No one. Now here was this girl in a white dress with wild bleached hair. She held the hem of her dress, scrunched above her knees, which were scratched and beading with crimson.

The girl with the wild hair stayed. Her name was Helena. Sarah took her into the house with little hesitation. She told Sarah and Kira stories, but with few words. They understood what Cal couldn't. The times she did speak didn't make much sense, but not because of her thick accent. Once she told them she flew here, and the next time she told them she walked, or that she swam. None of her stories explained the scrapes on her knees or the forest of scars on her back that Sarah washed every day.

She wove herself into their home. Helena latched onto Sarah like a child, and wanted to be by her side every moment she could find. When Sarah went out, it was Kira's turn. 

Though it wasn't her first choice, Helena could be persuaded into following Kira outside, to the river, to each and every one of her hiding places. Now they were no longer hers alone. Now she had something that was only theirs, and not something Sarah could give to her. She was years older than Kira, but she ran and played as if she wasn't. Her white dress was made of lace, and she didn't seem to mind when she tore and dirtied the edges. 

Sarah was never left alone with her thoughts. The good or the bad. Especially not the bad. She woke one night with the girl in the white dress curled on the edge of her bed, close enough to touch her, but leaving space between them. Alarm bells. If she didn't clear her head, it would all come back. Sarah remembered lying on her side in a tent. A can of beans. Laughing. Then the truck came, but she made it out of the house, out into the yard, where she could breathe before she saw who got out of it. She watched the road, half expecting the truck to come rolling towards her.

"Sarah?" The thick accent. She hadn't heard footsteps. "Are you alright?"

She gathered herself. It was dark, but the girl's pale skin was enough for both of them, "I'm alright. Go back to bed."

"You weren't in bed. I was worried." 

Something in her voice agitated Sarah.

"Well it's alright now, isn't it?"

"Yes."

They stood there like this, Sarah searching the wild girl's face for what had awakened the memories again. She was like a ghost, always hovering in the house, but not making herself known. But this was not the kind of ghost Sarah was used to. Not like the voices, the faces, her face. Who was this girl, who climbed out of the woods, or maybe the water, and into her bed? 

"Tell me who you are." 

This was not the same voice.

Not the same Sarah that had opened the door to a stranger. 

This was not patient, resigned, Sarah. Not the woman who had surrendered, and set down where she would be left by herself. Running and fighting were different, and she had given up on both. But with Helena's eyes digging through the dark, something was awake and alive again inside Sarah, and it was burning her mouth and fighting to get out. 

"Mommy?"

Kira was standing on the porch. Sarah hadn't heard her open the door, either. God, she was living in a house full of ghosts, but it was the ones made of flesh and blood that she could never keep a grip on. But Kira was her flesh, her blood. She picked her up, feeling warm skin that was half hers.

 

* * *

 

Don't love her too much.

Helena slowly gained Sarah's trust again after that night. She wanted to sleep next to Sarah, curled into her, feeling their bodies that were not all that different. But she knew she would lose her if she pulled too hard. 

Sarah was something to hold onto, an anchor in the stream that ripped at her clothes and pulled her away. From her family.

Don't love her too much.

She doesn't want you here. She left you. But there was nothing Helena could to to convince herself that Sarah didn't love her. She was made of love. She left them out of love. But she had left a ravine, she had carved it out as she left. She carved the ravines into Helena's back. Leaving.

I am loving her too much.

 

* * *

 

It took time, but Sarah knew. It didn't come to her suddenly, but the realization blew in the wind while she was cooking breakfast, or while she was folding clothes. It might have been Helena's wild halo of hair that made her remember. It might have been the shadow she saw when Helena sat up at night with sheets gathered at her waist and a shiny thing in her hand. But she knew. Helena was as much a part of her as Kira was, if not by growing together, one inside another, but side by side.

But Helena was abrasive. 

She mimicked Sarah, but she did it wrong. She picked up Kira for the first time after she saw Sarah do it, and Sarah's breath burned in her lungs before it came rushing out, and she took Kira away from her. The angry angel could make her yell even when she walked the same cold floor. And she walked it; she was slumped, crooked, carried like a string pulled her ahead, even though she was too heavy to move by herself. 

She was Sarah's flesh and blood. And Sarah loved her.

But she couldn’t love her. 

Helena would wake up in the middle of the night and walk through the house, sit by the window for hours, or sit curled on the stairs, waiting. Sarah found her in the yard once with a rabbit in her hands, bleeding. She asked Helena what the hell she would do that for, and all she could tell her was that "he was hurting."

Helena loved too, but Sarah loved too much. She loved enough to leave Helena behind, to make her into the ghost of a memory, only visible through foggy glass. She loved enough to leave her own blood. She loved Kira. She loved her so much that she shut down. She made Kira safe, but Kira was alone now. Because Sarah had fizzled and gone out to keep her safe. She had chosen a life that wasn’t really life, it was hiding, not running. 

Running.

That was the air that moved through her, the gulps of it she needed to keep the fire alive.

The fire had gone out. 

Or it hadn’t.

Maybe the fire was gone, but there was something. Helena was reaching, touching. She touched something, tugged, was gentle. She was gathering kindling to lay down, striking rocks, blowing air.   
She just wanted to lie down by the fire. 


End file.
